A Nonconformist Radical Thinker
A Nonconformist Radical Thinker
ASPECTS OF REVOLT, by Max Nomad. Bookman Associates, New York, 1959.
This collection of essays by the veteran writer Max Nomad is a reminder that we do have a radical who has devoted himself to uncovering unorthodox socialist thinkers and applying their theories to contemporary questions. Appropriately enough for the author of an earlier volume entitled A Skeptic’s Political Dictionary and Handbook for the Disenchanted, Nomad’s reward has been that some American radical intellectuals have expropriated his concepts without discussing their usefulness or recalling their source. James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, for example, was an application of some of the views of Waclaw Machajski, the Polish revolutionist whose ideas were first presented in America in Nomad’s Rebels and Renegades in 1932. Nomad quotes this passage from Machajski published in Russia in 1918. (By 1920 even the re-publication of Machajski books of twenty-five years earlier was prohibited):
The workers will not have their “workers” government even after the capitalists have disappeared. As long as the working class is condemned to ignorance, the intelligentsia will rule through the workersR...
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